Taking advantage of this sentiment, Expensify employs a very deliberate marketing tactic: “Expense reports that don’t suck.” Talk to anyone who uses antiquated expense report systems and they are bound to sigh and complain, frustrated by the experience but resigned to the fact they can’t do much about it. Expensify provides those people with a better alternative and, most importantly, empowers them to change the way they work.

This pattern is true for Heroku and developers inside of large companies. It’s often much faster to build and deploy a project externally on Heroku than to coordinate with IT to deploy internal resources; and those developers are much happier for it.

Dropbox and Box and Yammer, all of these companies are allies of the end user. To build internal support support, CoIT companies offer much better products to users, build momentum within an organization and eventually enable users to convince or demand that IT change vendors or policies.

As critical as building the right product for end users, CoIT companies ought to provide the right tools for the IT organizations who are often challenged by end users creating security challenges, demanding better tools, and on the whole pushing the IT team beyond comfort.

Each one of the companies presenting today will have a problem statement that focuses on the antagonism between employees and IT. Frustration is the indicator of opportunity.